The Pillars of Navigating Cloud Alliances with Boone Quesnel
Special guest Boone Quesnel, Head of Global Cloud Alliances at Starburst, discusses the strategies for aligning product roadmaps with Cloud Providers, and the importance of continuous engagement and enablement with product teams to foster long-term success. He also shares his expertise on leveraging brand partnerships within the cloud, exploring new market routes with joint solutions, and efficiently scaling revenue without the need for massive headcount expansion. In this episode, you’ll learn: - The importance of aligning product roadmaps with Cloud Providers' priorities to drive efficient joint solutions and become launch partners for mutual promotions - The significance of continuous enablement and engagement with various product teams to maintain momentum and adapt long-term strategies - How to leverage cloud partnerships and Marketplaces for creating consumable solutions that can scale revenue without significantly increasing headcount Connect with Boone Quesnel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boonequesnel/ Connect with Erin Figer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erinfiger/ Connect with Patrick Riley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickmriley/ Learn more about Tackle: https://tackle.io/
Everyone's going to have a different value
across the different clouds,
but the better that you align on that and report on that,
the more support you're going to get to try to go do
more unique things as you do the corporate development
and product alignment pieces.
- Welcome to Unlock Cloud GoToMarket,
the series where hosts Aaron Figer and Patrick Riley
share the essential stages of the Cloud GTM maturity model
to start, optimize, and grow your company's revenue
through the Cloud.
They've helped countless ISVs tackle the ins and outs
of their Cloud GTM motion.
And in each episode, they're sharing those success stories
from the people who have put them into place.
Because ultimately, this way of thinking is the future
and the future is now.
- In this episode of Unlock Cloud GoToMarket,
we interviewed Boone Quennell at Starburst.
He shares with us how he is seen two times the deal size
and the deals are closing two times faster
by implementing his three-pillar approach
to unlocking his Cloud GoToMarket strategy.
Stay tuned to learn more about his experience
and what those pillars are.
- Hi, Boone, welcome to the Unlock Cloud GTM podcast.
Thanks for coming today.
- No problem, thanks for having me.
- So today we're here to talk about Cloud alliances,
where they are and where they're going.
And Boone's joining us from Starburst,
formerly of Rubik, but Boone, could you give us an overview
of just kind of who you are and your professional career?
- My whole career started out in the var world,
selling boxes in the data centers, all that kind of fun stuff.
And then got the opportunity to go over to ServiceNow
right after they went public and learn, you know,
the true enterprise sales motions that they had
and what this whole Cloud thing was all about.
Obviously they have their own Cloud,
but to kind of give you a view into the world
of where things were going and then got the opportunity
to then go to Rubik and start to build
like Cloud alliances background that I have now
and then ended up at Starburst to do it again.
- That's awesome.
Well, we're gonna talk to you more about those experiences.
But first we kind of just wanna tee up.
So for those of you that are new to the podcast,
we are here to talk about unlocking
your Cloud good and market strategies.
And as part of that,
Tacko looks at all of our different ISVs
with a lens of maturity.
And so we've got our Cloud good and market maturity models
and we have four different stages of maturity.
We base these stages on a couple categories,
people, processes, technology and Cloud alliances.
And so we break up customers into these different bands
and we look at them through the stages
of establishing foundation to building adoption,
to driving adoption and to scaling adoption.
And so today we're gonna pick apart
some of those stages of maturity
and where Boone has seen success
and overcome some challenges
in each of those different stages.
And we'll call those out as we go through.
That's kind of how our maturity model works
and how we're thinking about the conversation today.
- All right, Boone,
let's dive into the foundational pillars
of Cloud alliances and how to effectively navigate them.
You've had extensive experience from rubric
and now at Starburst.
So let's unpack some of your key strategies.
When setting up a Cloud alliance strategy,
what are the foundational pillars that you focus on?
- Colors is the right way to think about it
because they are discreetly different,
but they all build on to the foundation
that you're gonna go unlock the new markets with.
And so we think about them
or I've thought about them across programs.
So the things that everyone's familiar with
from CoSEL to marketplace to marketing,
all the things you've got to be really good at
inside of the Cloud ecosystem to get their attention
and then product.
And we're gonna go deeper into each of these product alignment.
So what is the strategy for your company
and how do you go take what you've built
with the programs to go unlock access
and different kind of unique things
and then corporate development.
And this is where like my sales background
probably comes in the most is just doing the programs
and connecting the product is really cool.
And it's obviously foundational to what you do.
But if you're not trying to get to the higher level
or unlock new use cases and do things
that are a little bit different than traditional,
then I think you're leaving some things on the table.
And so we strive to kind of operate across those three pillars.
- I like that you have like program execution,
product alignment and corporate development.
What do you have to get good at first
in order to get on the Cloud partners radar
and begin to unlock that opportunity
to have a seat at the table?
Where do you start?
- As long as a product has been built on the Cloud,
most of the time that is what's happening, right?
In the ecosystem we all live in,
people are building SaaS applications on the Cloud, right?
So the most important things after that
is gonna be the programmatic pieces of it.
The Co-Cell marketplace,
and then how do you tie those things
into the marketing campaigns?
Both you have and then you can start to get access to
things like MDF and stuff like that.
And so that's the scoreboard.
And five years ago when I was at Rubric,
it was very Co-Cell heavy.
We've seen a shift in the market to more marketplace.
They're still both very important,
but just understanding how you're scored
and what programs you need to invest into
to be able to go to the next stage
is the way that I think about it.
- It's not even like a shift, it's an and.
There was only Co-Cell in the beginning
and now there's marketplace.
So now it's Co-Cell and marketplace.
Both things helping you get on that Cloud partners radar
so that you can start to have a seat at the table.
- Co-Cell was always cool.
You can always get access to the right Microsoft sellers,
AWS sellers, Google sellers.
But they didn't have like a tangible thing to march you to
to help you with that wasn't just like
getting your own paper side.
Now that there's marketplace
and they have marketplace specialist overlays
and the things tackle helps us get access to in those teams
because they're so well connected across
all the ISPs you guys work with
actually gives you like a finite thing
to work towards together.
- And the ability to build a more well-rounded route
to market now with the Cloud partner.
- Yeah, and ultimately they have some stake in it.
They may need to help that customer do it
because it's their first time
or it's a new person in procurement.
- Speaking of Co-Cell marketplace,
in the program execution pillar you talked about,
what kind of lift did you get
and what kind of support did you get
and from whom within that pillar
when you think about doing those Co-Cell activities
and starting those marketplace activities,
what did that look like for you all?
- Prior to Starburst, myself and then another gentleman
who actually started the Cloud stuff here at Starburst
before me, Harrison Johnson worked at Nissuni.
We knew it was important to get Co-Cell right
and marketplace offered a running fast.
And so between he and myself four years ago,
we decided to get the Co-Cell motion going
in conjunction at the same time as marketplace.
That seemed to be the most important piece
and leveraging tackle both from a marketplace,
get our listings up and running quickly.
Back in the day, Google wasn't as easy as it is today
to get up and running and so that was a huge piece.
And then also like have the Co-Cell stuff automated.
- Did you see any time to market differences early on
in that kind of establishing foundation building
adoption phase in that program execution around like,
hey, are we closing deals any faster with marketplace
and we were direct?
How did that look?
- One is we saw deals get done that wouldn't have happened.
So it's hard to quantify the data back three, four years ago
for us, we've looked what was closed faster back then,
but we did know and we did track deals
that would not have happened without the marketplace.
So there's a chunk of revenue,
we just wouldn't have today as a company if we didn't do it.
Since then we did start tracking data.
So more towards three, four years in on our side.
We did see if you surround your deals with partners
doing Co-Cell and marketplace and all the right things,
you're gonna do deals two times bigger, two times faster.
That actually includes for us, not just cloud Co-Cell,
but also Co-Cell with SIs and other ISVs.
- We get a lot of good feedback from customers
around their growth rates.
And we try very much now to help track that
through our benchmarking and baselineing with customers,
but seeing kind of that 200% increase is quite a feat.
So that's a great accolade to have.
- We automate that process with cloud Co-Cell.
Do you have an SI and do you have an ISV surrounding your deal?
So it's like grown from just cloud
to a much bigger kind of piece of the puzzle.
- In the beginning, you were laser focused as well
as getting this all operational inside of Salesforce.
Those fundamental elements are so crucial,
but so is the execution side of the house.
So can you elaborate on a specific challenge?
Like we always talk about like all the good stuff, right?
Like, oh, it's good, it's good.
But we also learn from our mistakes
or we learn from the things that challenge us.
What were some of the challenges that you faced
and how did tackle help you overcome it?
- We did early on integrate our cloud Co-Cell processes
with tapo Co-Cell into our Salesforce process.
So we're a very simple sales process company.
We have four stages.
If you try to move your deal from stage one
as a stellar to stage two,
we require you to pick which cloud,
if not multiple to share it with, right?
Then that sets off the automated process
that we all do together.
What we did see though was people would just mark no,
not because they didn't want to talk to the cloud.
They just didn't want to talk to the cloud yet.
And so we started to see a ballooning of nose
in our S2 pipeline.
It took us back.
Maybe we're a year and a half in,
new salespeople have come on,
maybe we didn't train them enough
to understand why we're doing this
and when we're doing this, right?
And so the feedback we started to get was it just felt too soon.
I didn't understand it.
So we had to scrub that data with the tackle team,
go back through and do a round of enablement.
And so now we do enablement about every other quarter,
just to make sure all the new reps
that a fast-growing company understand the why we do this
and that it's not sharing proprietary data.
There's a very controlled way that we share data
and they're the ones that get to share the special sauce
once they get on the phone with the cloud sellers.
We have a really cool automation process
and then we created our own problem by not enabling.
- You're not alone.
I mean, so many times when someone will say,
"Hey, can you talk to this ISV?"
They're struggling.
And so I'll get on the phone and I'll start to talk to them.
And one of the first things I ask them is like,
well, what have you done around initial enablement?
And what are you doing around your ongoing enablement?
That's the part, like they executed their initial enablement
but that didn't execute in ongoing,
always continually enabling.
And I think that's one of like the dirty secrets
about cloud alliance partnerships.
And this is a route to market is like,
you are signing up as an alliance person.
Like you are signing up for constant enablement.
It's never done.
It's always evolving.
It's always changing.
You always need to enable.
And just when you think you have everyone enabled,
new sellers come into the org, those sellers leave the org
and now you've got to do it all over again, right?
So enablement never goes away.
And I haven't seen a job description recently
of a cloud alliance person
but I really hope that people are putting in enablement
and ongoing enablement in that job description.
- They're doing a great job to it.
So I guess they have great skills.
- As a startup, you were a small lean machine
in the beginning days.
So really banking on tackle and our team of folks
to be an extension of your team.
And you've since grown that team
but we're growing there right alongside of you.
- You can either hire people
and build automation yourself
or there's vendors like tackle
that are an extension of your workbench.
And ultimately they have people
that live and breed this all day
instead of a quarter of a person
or a half of a person in sales or business ops
trying to remember what they did last week
when they pulled this report.
This is a much more seamless way when we leverage tackle
and we see that not having to add
headcount on our side and things like that.
- Yeah, that's how I used it too.
I leaned very heavily on my tackle resources
when I had hired them before I came here.
So I get it.
- From the operations perspective
and the enablement perspective,
none of that happens overnight.
It definitely takes time
and the strategy has to get rolling
before you can start to get some real momentum.
And from a cloud provider perspective,
getting their attention is one thing
but then just as we have to do
with the sales reps and enablement,
we've got to keep their attention as well.
And so in order to keep that,
we have to constantly be realigning
with the things that matter to them.
Right now it's AI.
Do we have mutual AI customers?
You know, a year or two from now,
who knows what it's going to be?
But we have to always align with what they're focused on
to keep doing that.
- Yeah, definitely agreed.
And then they'll do a reorg, right?
Like we saw AWS do this last year
on their port organization
and then you're remapping everything, right?
So that's where the sales intuition
of understanding when changes happen
or how do you go make sure you're talking
to the right people and you're promoting yourself
appropriately as a big piece of what you have
to do in the cloud alliances.
- I think that's one of the things that you've done
really well at Starburst
and your lessons you learned over at rubric
and kind of bringing that over
and getting a chance to do it again
is that when you partner with the clouds,
they change often, they change their priorities often
and you've really got to constantly be aligning
to the metrics that matter and to their priorities
and even to their products.
What have been some of the things like,
you started one way at Starburst
and you've seen that shift
and you guys are constantly shifting and aligning?
- Yeah, it's actually cross company.
So I saw a huge change when we were at rubric
and I think you're going to talk with Shane
at some point in this pod bar theory.
So he'll go into way more detail.
He's kind of my mentor and I work for him at rubric
but we were super deep with Microsoft
doing some pretty cool things
and as we've seen rubric is how I'm going to go on public
and had it invested from Microsoft before that happened.
And so the big learning for me was when I shifted to Starburst,
they didn't have the same product gap
in the data analytics space that Starburst operates in
that they had in the backup data management space
that rubric operated in.
And so like for me, it was kind of like,
oh, it's just gonna be washerids or repeat,
we'll go do the same things with Microsoft
but it's different, right?
'Cause they have different priorities on that side
of the house and they have a whole different products
that where AWS was the opposite.
It was hard to break into that infrastructure backup world
at AWS and rubric has obviously done that now
but I just remember when I came over to Starburst,
it was so much easier to get access to people
at AWS and they never was at rubric.
It's just finding where you fit each cloud
is super important 'cause they're all different,
especially depending on the services
that they have on their side of the fence.
And so I'd say that is the biggest learning I've had
from like when things shift around.
- Well, Boone, we talked a lot about kind of setting ourselves
up with establishing our foundation
but part of that outside of the operational piece
and you mentioned a little bit here was product,
that product alignment is definitely vital.
What approach did you all use to ensure
that your product roadmap aligned their priorities
and how did you keep that kind of continuity of business going?
- Yeah, it's definitely gotta have the programmatic things
we just talked about in order to be able
to have a seat at the table.
So that's like the importance of like
the first pillar does come first in this kind of concept.
The second pillar is super important to understand
your own product leadership and team strategy and roadmap.
And then go find places you can help accelerate that
on the cloud side that's also gonna get the cloud to win.
For us, we are a analytics compute engine.
We drive a lot of compute consumption.
And so for us to look at how do we make our product
more efficient for our joint customers?
We worked with the compute teams at AWS, EKS
and things like that to find the right architecture
to run the best solution together.
And that's a collaboration.
That's not just us saying,
hey, we're gonna go build on this type of processor
or whatever, it's access to processors early in the process,
be able to test it and be able to be a launch partner
in this type of a scenario.
So super important to drive the best in class service
on your side in conjunction with their services together.
And you get promoted for that, right?
When you're a launch partner for something like Graviton,
you're gonna get promoted as one of those launch partners
at re-invent.
It's not just product for product sake, it's product.
And then it spins out into a GTM motion
that you can leverage as well.
- I think that's an area that a lot of IFVs miss
is this foundational product alignment
and continuing to align.
So we don't see that all the time,
but we do see it in the successful ones.
So it's refreshing to hear that this is an important pillar
and important strategy.
Back to the foundational pillar of program execution
without that, we don't get access to these people.
And so it's a little bit of you have to build the cart
before you can pull it with the horse,
but you've got to build the cart.
'Cause they do look at the scoreboard, right?
If you're paying a product leader,
they're gonna look at the same scoreboard as seller does.
These guys don't share very many deals,
they didn't do much marketplace, what are we doing?
- How are you like maintaining that momentum
and keeping your team aligned
and like keeping everybody engaged
and continuing to evolve that strategy?
- Continuous enablement externally, right?
So we talked about internal enablement to our teams.
We are always finding new product teams and leaders
to go enable on what we're doing.
A good example of this last year was
enabling the QuickSight product team.
I think it was at Reinvent two Reinvents ago actually
where we are to open source Trino,
the commercial version here at Starburst.
They had been building the Trino connector,
but then we showed them the value of what building
a Starburst connector would provide
to our joint customers and they built a connector
on their side.
So without enabling them on what is different,
sometimes it's an open source for commercial offering
difference, how are we different than their own services?
What are the use cases that makes sense?
And some of these product teams will lean in
and build things.
We see the same with Google and GDC, right?
We have the ability to do hybrid analytics
and Google seats a ton of value in that.
What I'm hearing from you is that it's truly
a multifaceted approach.
It involves a collection of initiatives and activities
that you have to do over a long period of time
and that it's not just I put a listing out there,
I shared a few deals, I talked to this one area
of the product or we built our product initially this way.
It's that you're constantly talking to lots
of different teams, trying to get connected
in a lot of different ways.
You're continuing to evolve the product
and align it with more use cases and more
of the cloud's products, not just one area
and that you're doing this consistently
over a long period of time.
You said three, four years now that you have been
at Starburst, like you're still doing this.
It's like Simon Simic has the infinite game.
When I read that book, I was like cloud alliances
and a route to market with the cloud partnerships.
You are signing up for an infinite game.
It's always going, you're always evolving it.
There's no winning and losing, there's just like,
I'm gonna opt in or I'm gonna opt out.
>> Yeah, and I think I didn't bring up AI first, Patrick did.
And so you have to think about things
in a totally different lens that you hadn't been thinking
about for three years.
And so just being nimble on your feet
and not getting stuck flat-footed is super important.
>> Well, you had a third pillar,
which was corporate development and new routes to market.
Beyond co-selling and marketplace,
what other routes to market have you explored
through your corporate development initiatives?
>> The way I look at these in core development
as the third pillar is now you have all the programs
executing anyone that looks at your dashboard.
They're gonna be happy with where you're at as a partner,
giving your size and relevance in the market.
And then you have product, humming along,
making sure you're providing the best service you can.
And then from there, how do you build on top of that?
How do you create new routes to market typically
that starts with joint solutions?
Maybe it's not like a product-built solution,
it's more of a GTM solution.
How do we take a concept like Starburst promoting
the ice house, which in the data analytics world
is the iceberg table format plus our engine,
creates an ice house.
It's a fun marketing thing,
the summer of ice house this summer.
How do we get the cloud spleen to that
and do joint things with us,
with their different service teams or product things?
So it's differentiated.
We're not just another partner.
And so that's the first kind of like branch out.
And then you start to test those different solution areas.
Would it make more sense that this look like an OEM
or a white label and things that we could actually
look to in bed?
Is the customer asking, wouldn't it be awesome
if it was just one solution?
And so then we go after different routes to market,
whether that's OEM or putting the different consoles,
whether that's Google or AWS or Azure,
to find a better way to get in front
of their customers faster.
- And because you've built this really great brand
inside of the cloud partnership,
you now can leverage that as a platform
to engage with your ecosystem.
And they can help promote an up level
and elevate you into those partnerships as well
to hopefully get those partnerships running faster
than if you were out there trying to do it on your own.
- Yeah, and I think the next iteration,
I don't think anyone's truly figured it out yet.
How do you get like a tri-party truly going?
Whether that's Accenture plus Starburst plus AWS
or that's Starburst plus some ISV plus Azure, right?
And then truly start to put solutions out collaboratively
that are consumable via something like the marketplace.
I think that's going to be the next evolution,
especially as we see technology superpowers go
more and more vertical focused.
You'll get things that are encapsulated
as vertical use cases in that domain.
I think that's where we're going.
And that's what excites me about the next evolution
and where all this goes.
- Some people talk about it as bundling or bundles,
these more collaborative solutions,
these managed service solutions.
And I think maybe that's a little bit why,
like Microsoft for a couple of years now,
they've had the ability in partner center
to invite partners to their opportunities.
And you can do a tri-cocel opportunity together.
But if you can't sell it that way
and you can't incent it that way
and it doesn't light up on anyone's metrics that way,
then it's a nice to have.
So I think as we see that capability unlock
in the marketplace, then quickly following
we'll need that capability unlocked in Co-SEL
so that we can continue to unlock, stop Co-SEL
and sell through the marketplace are joint solutions.
- I think when we forget sometimes,
I think we're all guilty of this in the alliances world
is like, how does the customer want to buy?
Should we do a better job collectively
understanding that part first
and then build the systems or solutions backwards into that?
So sometimes, you know, every feature comes out
from one of the cloud marketplaces we all jump on.
But is that even what the customer is asking for?
Sometimes we don't know.
- I'm gonna take it back to your pillar, Boone,
because you talked about a couple important things
from a corporate development perspective,
where we didn't measure that as well.
So not only the partnerships and the investments,
Co-SEL and marketplace, we constantly here ISV
is asking us for like, how do we measure success here
and what's that look like?
And we've got our own thoughts, but from your perspective,
these are new routes to market.
So what metrics do you look at as most important to you?
- We actually MBO on it.
So we do a quarterly payout.
So we assign targets and it's not necessarily like
certain people we want to get in front of,
maybe it is like we want to get in front of
this level of person inside of this cloud, this quarter.
That is gonna be MBO for someone on my team or myself,
depending on the situation.
Or it's, hey, we have this strategic thing moving.
We need to get it to X by the end of the quarter.
'Cause we know this is a, well, one year,
two year sales cycle to get a more embedded motion going.
How do we move the right thing forward that quarter?
And so we really do bring it all the way down to that level
and combine it and track that these things are getting done
across the full year cycle, but on a quarterly basis.
- It's embedded in your goal length
because we always talk about the salespeople.
We need to compensate them, but it should be
in the leadership team as well.
And with alliances, if it's something that is truly
meaningful and a route to market that the company
really wants to pursue.
- So our goal as a company is to get to 50%
of our booked revenue, renewals, net new expansion
to be through the marketplaces.
That's up from 30 to 40% over the last couple years.
So it's another tick in the right direction.
- Yeah, that's huge.
That doesn't come from a lot of manual processes either, right?
So you did all this in kind of an establishing foundation phase,
building adoption, but now you've scaled success.
And I assume you've done that through some automation.
Can you tell us about how did you automate or ingrain
these processes into the rhythm of your business today?
- Yeah, it's similar to Co-Sell putting it in Salesforce.
That's where the sellers all live
and making that flow through the table platform.
So our ability to track all these disparate,
whether it's an offer going out, being accepted,
a Co-Sell process, it all goes through the tackle platform
and it simplifies our view of the world.
So we're feeding our data, whether it's sales data
or product ingestion data for billing,
right into tackle and then it gets distributed out
to the appropriate cloud.
And ultimately it lets us scale with less people.
And that's the whole goal as a series, Dean and startup,
we want to do more requests all the time.
- So are you enabling your sellers to request a Co-Sell
or are you doing more of like an Alliance-led Co-Sell motion?
- Yeah, so as part of that stage one to stage two process,
it's the sellers, but ultimately as we discussed,
we got to enable them to understand why
and that we see the really good percentage of sharing
that we want above 60, 70% of our deals get shared
in a given year, pipeline-wise.
And that's really good, especially considering
like we have some customers that only buy on prem.
So we're not necessarily sharing those deals with clouds
'cause it's not applicable to what they're doing.
And so it's really the automated process
for the sellers and sales-led.
- Are your sellers requesting for a private offer
or requesting to go through the marketplace
and starting to create that initial private offer
or are you using it more of like the sellers
raising their hand, the customer's interested
in private offer.
And then that kicks over to an operations team
who's going to actually do the marketplace private offer.
- So typically the seller engages the customer
in the AWS account team, one or both of them,
hey, does marketplace make sense to you, right?
As the customer, maybe this is pre-assigned budget
that you can tap into from an AWS perspective,
maybe they know the CFO has XYZ initiative
to put so much revenue from ISVs through the marketplace.
And then they'll come back to my team,
Cloud Alliance's team and/or their deal-best operations team.
When it's an appropriate time to start looking at
how should we pack and jump this private offer?
So it's a SaaS deal, we still have an enterprise software
listing, we start to look at how is this going to actually
be transacted and which cloud and make sure we're ahead of it.
So, you know, if the deal happens to be the day
at the end of the quarter, we don't run into any snags
that we were not prepared for.
- Got it.
You were talking about 50% of your booked revenue
going through the cloud marketplace.
I think you also said you have a metric
around actionable co-cell.
What is actionable co-cell?
- To be candid is 50% of booked revenue
through the marketplace and/or actionable co-cell.
So co-cell, not just for the sake of I put it in the system
and it's there, we got it into the system, it's tracked
and we've actually gotten something out of the cloud
that could be, you know, the AWS seller introduces us
to an executive we didn't have access to.
They help us map out the procurement process.
They do a technical review with us and the customer
in person, you know, there's a list of things we've actually
created that are actionable co-cell that we do actually
come up on.
And so like that's part of it is like not every customer
is going to use the marketplace.
Yes, it's super important to a lot of people,
but even some very large cloud shops don't use the marketplace.
And so there has to be this balance of we're doing the right
thing no matter how the customer is going to procure
and part of that is how do we get value to move our deals faster.
I love that.
And when we're also working with other ISVs,
we're like, how should we do this?
And these are the things that it takes to be successful.
We know we need to do all of these things.
There's only so much time in the day to get to all of those things.
So who are the best folks on our teams to be focused on these activities?
Knowing that we need to do all these activities
and have this comprehensive approach.
You guys invest in using our Co-Cell Managed Services
so that the Co-Cell operations can be handled by the Co-Sop operations team.
That then frees up your team so that you can actually get to
engaging in the field, doing Co-Cell at the field bubble,
and tracking actionable Co-Cell.
Yeah, and it's a super important part for us to be able to scale.
Like most companies over the last couple of years,
we're not adding a ton of people all the time.
And so it's how do we continue to grow revenue
while also not adding too many people?
And that's been a huge driver for us.
And we view it as collaboratively the Cloud Alliance's team at Starburst
plus the tackle Co-Cell and Marketplace teams.
We provide programs to our field sellers and field partner people.
So we have field people that are responsible for partner activities.
And they're ultimately the receivers of the programs that we deploy to them,
whether that's Co-Cell, Marketplace, credits, marketing.
We view it as a collaborative effort to deliver those programs,
no matter where that field seller and partner person are.
I think you're hitting on a key part of the recipe,
which is you have to have the right mindset around this entire approach
to make a statement that 50% of booked revenue.
That's significant number.
A number like that means Starburst is really seeing the value
in their Cloud partnerships as a meaningful route to market.
And in order to unlock Cloud Go to Market,
you really have to put yourself in the Cloud partners market.
What do you mean by that?
It's interesting when you have new leader command
or someone that's worked in an NSAS company before.
And they're like, yep, we work with a whole bunch of partners.
We work with the Cloud, we work with the ISPs.
What makes the clouds different?
Maybe they don't think they are different.
They're just another partner in the tech ecosystem.
Where they are different is they're truly a market.
They don't just make technology like the rest of us ISVs.
They actually are where everyone goes to buy and deploy
their services that generate money from a customer lens.
And so it's not just being a good partner to be a good partner.
It's being a good partner to have access to their market.
So it's a totally different dynamic.
The fourth market, that's not one of the three clouds,
is on-prem for us.
And so we view them as four different markets.
Yes, three of them are actually clouds,
but they are their own market.
And they think and operate differently depending
on which cloud it is.
And on-prem is obviously different than all three of those.
Your customers are in one or more of those markets.
So you have to put yourself in that market
where your customers are in order to best serve
and support your customers.
OK, Boone, any final thoughts on what others can learn
from your journey with cloud alliances at Rubric and Starburst?
Stay focused.
I think that your little quote, the infinite cycle,
the Simon Sennick quote is super important.
We forget it sometimes and we stop enabling for a couple quarters
and then it bites us in the butt.
So that always has to stay true.
And then make sure your executives are bought in
and understand the value they're getting back.
Everyone's going to have a different value
across the different clouds.
But the better that you align on that and report on that,
the more support you're going to get to try to go do more unique things
as you do the corporate development and product alignment pieces.
I love how you broke it out into those different pillars too.
So it keeps it simple.
So hopefully if you've done listening,
you can take away your own pillars
or you can use Boone's successful pillars as kind
of a foundational guiding principles, if you will,
on what you can do for your own channel for Cloud Go to Market.
Thank you, Boone.
It was such a pleasure to have you on our podcast.
I so appreciate your time.
I thoroughly enjoy working with you.
I think we've been working together now seven, eight years.
So it's just been so fun to, I mean, just be in this journey together,
learning, sharing and challenging each other.
Yeah.
So like I mentioned earlier, pushing into the next evolution of it,
there'll be something new and we'll have to collectively do that
as an alliances community.
And tackle is here to help and be a part of that with you every step of the way
OK, Patrick, you know I love aha moments.
What was one of your aha moments after this episode with Boone
and our conversation that we had with him?
First of all, can I say a word for the moose in the background?
I love that photo.
I love that moose.
Yeah, I need to get it in my pond back here.
Well, one of the biggest things for me was how he took his lessons learned from
Rubric
and tried to immediately go and apply those to Starburst
and quickly realized that the product fit within the Cloud provider was so
different
that he was going to have to take a different approach with a different cloud.
And so to me, the big aha moment was this definitely, as we know,
isn't a cookie cutter exercise.
You can't just take what works in one ISV and then put it in another.
You have to evaluate your product fit.
And to me, like that's always overlooked and even I'm guilty of that.
So the way they looked at how they fit their product into a particular cloud
was super important to follow.
And I hope everybody takes away something from that.
One of the very first questions I always ask that ISV is like,
tell me about your product.
Do we have product market fit?
Are you driving consumption or are you driving metrics that matter to that
cloud?
Are you going to be relevant to them?
It's so important because if you aren't, this is going to be a really hard
route to market for you.
I also loved how Boone was talking about.
It's a mindset.
Like you have to think about this cloud partnership as its own market
and you've got to go put yourself into Microsoft's market.
You got to go put yourself into AWS's market.
You got to go put yourself into Google's market.
Not just a channel too, right?
I push ISV stilling.
This is a channel you need to invest in it as a channel.
But also we need to think about it investing in a specific market.
It's not your market that you think you're always selling.
It's this cloud providers market.
So that's a good point.
And then when you go into that market, like you have to do a lot of things.
It's a multi-faceted approach.
Like it's not one route to market or one activity.
There are many things we have to do in order to be successful in this market.
And I've got to go do it again and a little bit different because they're a
little different.
Even though they're all cloud providers, they're all unique in their own ways.
Fantastic conversation today.
Unlocked cloud go to market with Boone Quinell of Starburst.
I am your co-host Patrick Riley.
I'm your co-host Aaron Feiger.
And thanks for listening.
So pull up a chair, grab a notebook and join us as we share the essential
stages
of the maturity model to start, optimize and grow your company's revenue using
the cloud.
For more resources on executing your cloud go to market strategy, you can visit
our website
at tackle.io.
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